


Play The Game

by tinknevertalks



Series: Fictober 2018 [22]
Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Family, Gen, Growing Up, Pre-Series, Sanctuhana
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 03:20:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16715660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tinknevertalks/pseuds/tinknevertalks
Summary: Henry and Ashley are being noisier than usual, so Helen has to investigate.





	Play The Game

**Author's Note:**

> It's the one that inspired day 15's ficlet! There's also some of my headcanons creeping into this one (and they're not happy ones). I hope you enjoy.
> 
> Prompt: I know how you love to play games.

Helen had been listening to the constant stream of whooping and yelling from the playroom for the last fifteen minutes from the window seat outside the room, smiling as Ashley’s cheers for Henry chorused with his own as he did something worthy of yelling. She wasn’t quite sure what they were yelling about, but they were having fun on a rainy day that didn’t involve puddle stomping. Deciding to investigate further, she poked her head in on them.

Not quite in the television, but close enough that she worried for their eyesight, sat Henry, Ashley, and Charlie, Helen’s second since her pregnancy. Henry had one control pad in his hands - it looked just that little bit too big for his nine year old body - and Charlie had the other, his thumbs covering the buttons easily. On the screen were brightly coloured go-karts and little characters driving them. “Who’s winning?” she asked.

“Henry is, mommy! He’s really good!” Ashley told her brightly. Both boys waved distractedly in Helen’s direction, before starting yet another race.

Charlie left the Sanctuary early 2001. His reasons to Helen had been almost pedestrian, but she didn’t begrudge him them. Still, it came as a surprise to Henry, when he came home from college that year. Over the years, they had become as thick as thieves (although, not quite as close as Henry was to the Big Guy), something Helen had been grateful for when her own relationship with him begun disintegrating. Knocking on his door, she waited until she heard Henry’s, “Yeah,” before she entered his room.

“How’re you doing?”

He shrugged. “Y’know… Eh.”

She nodded. “Right.” Casting around for anything to talk about, she sighed internally. “Before he left, Charlie gave me a package to give you. It’s in the lab.”

“Did you send him away?”

“What?” Her breath caught in her throat. “Henry, I… What makes you think I sent him away?”

“He loved it here, Magnus. Why would he leave?”

She sighed again, aloud and exhausted. “He wanted a family.”

That stopped Henry. Deflating, he sat down with a soft thump on his bed. “But… we’re his family?” Helen arched her eyebrow, and he deflated further. “I know… things are… weird, with us right now,” she nodded, not wanting to say anything to cause another argument with him so soon after he’d come home, “but he… Charlie was gonna be here when I started here… If I could,” he added, quietly.

Sitting down next to him, she laid her hand on his forearm. “You are always welcome here. This is your home as well as mine.”

He nodded. “In the lab?”

“In the lab,” she echoed, standing.

“I’ll uh… I’ll get it later.”

“Take your time.”

In her office, she read and reread the note Charlie had left her.

_Hey Doctor M, things with you and Henry will get better, but maybe this will help. I know how you love to play games of the board variety, but these will help you relate to him better. He still has the high score._

_Don’t worry about me. You’ll find your protégé soon._

_Charles_

She’d found the note with a small shoe box. In it were the cartridges she’d watched Henry play as a child. Maybe…


End file.
